A leather and a nylon laptop bag made by Dell
The two laptop bags pictured here are both made by Dell and came with Dell laptops from work.
Now a lot of people are not going to be huge fans of Dell laptop bags. I mean, these are not the most stylish or cool looking bags by a long shot. But they are pretty well made and score highly for practicality. And they really just blend in in a business setting.
Starting with the leather laptop bag. The first thing that you notice about this is that it is actually quite a high quality bag.
The stitching is all really high quality as are the fittings and the attention to detail is superb.
If you look at the clips connecting the laptop bag to the strap they are made of really high quality metal.They clip in securely and don’t pop open very easily at all.
These are not the usual plastic bits of rubbish that you find on a lot of bags. The ones that bend and break and drops your laptop down a flight of stairs as I’ve once had happen with another carrying case.
Okay. Here’s another detail that I liked. If you look closely at the tag on the zipper (and please excuse my pathetic excuse at taking photographs – I’ll get better at this with time – I hope) you will note a little round loop. There is a matching one on the other zipper so you can lock the main laptop compartment of the bag. That may seem a pretty useless idea. At least I thought it was, until just before Christmas this year I was on a business flight with my laptop in its bag in the overhead locker. Normally it is right above my head, but in this case it had been moved about two rows back by the air hostess because she needed to cram something else in. I still figured it wasn’t a problem as I would notice if anyone tampered with it.
WRONG – When I got back into town from the airport I opened my bag and my laptop was GONE! That was an expensive lesson for me. From now on I plan to lock the bag, even when I think it is in sight. It is a whole lot harder for a stinking thief to sneak a whole laptop case off an airplane than it must have been for this fiend to just slip my computer into his bag.
What else can I tell you about the leather Dell case. Oh yes, it also has a really funky little organizer pocket at the front that takes all my stuff like flash drives, spare USB cable, keys and coins when I’m going through airport security. It opens right up with two zippers so you can really get in there and it also has a top flap with magnetic strips.
The newer nylon laptop case that I got with my replacement computer is clearly a cheaper product. That said the build quality still seems excellent. It also has the metal hooks on the carrying strap but is inferior in that it lacks most of the features of its more expensive sibling. It has only one main compartment (vs two on the leather bag), lacks the little loops on the zipper to allow it to take a lock (come on Dell, how much extra would those have cost) and generally looks a lot cheaper.
What it does not lack is padding. This seems to be one seriously protective bag. The main outer has a later of quite stiff foam in in it that provides quite a bit of protection against bangs and drops already. But the real protection is in the actual laptop compartment where it has another layer of stiff foam with little indentations. These aren’t quite egg box style, but they do protrude and provide a lot of padding.
In short, either of these bags will do the job and do it well. Of the two, I clearly prefer the leather bag. It looks a lot more expensive (in some parts of town that may be a bad thing) and it has a bit more space. That said my complain with both is that while they are great dedicated laptop bags that is more or less all they are. I don’t find that they have the space to take a lot of documents or much of anything else if I’m attending a conference. And if I’m travelling for business they are too big to fit into another bag comfortably nor do they carry much on their own. That may not be a problem in many places but here in Europe where the cheapest flights are with low cost carries such as Easyjet and Ryanair that only allow one piece of hand luggage then it become an issue. So I usually end up trading up to a bigger bag that can also double as an overnight bag or trading down to a neoprene sleeve that slips into my normal wheeled hand luggage.
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